In another room are two carved doors from a house in Hoorn that had been disfurnished which give one a very vivid idea of the old good taste of this people and the little palaces of grave art in which they lived.

Thursday is Hoorn’s market day, and it is important to be there then if one would see the market carts of North Holland in abundance.  We had particularly good fortune since our Thursday was not only market day but the Kermis too.  I noticed that the principal attraction of the fair, for boys, was the stalls (unknown at the Kermis both at Middelburg and Leyden) on which a variety of flat cake was chopped with a hatchet.  The chopper, who I understand is entitled only to what he can sever with one blow, often fails to get any.

Nieuwediep and The Helder, at the extreme north of Holland, are one, and interesting only to those to whom naval works are interesting.  For they are the Portsmouth and Woolwich of the country.  My memories of these twin towns are not too agreeable, for when I was there in 1897 the voyage from Amsterdam by the North Holland canal had chilled me through and through, and in 1904 it rained without ceasing.  Nieuwediep is all shipping and sailors, cadet schools and hospitals.  The Helder is a dull town, with the least attractive architecture I had seen, cowering beneath a huge dyke but for which, one is assured, it would lie at the bottom of the North Sea.  Under rain it is a drearier town than any I know; and ordinarily it is bleak and windy, saved only by its kites, which are flown from the dyke and sail over the sea at immense heights.  Every boy has a kite—­one more link between Holland and China.

I climbed the lighthouse at The Helder just before the lamp was lit.  It was an impressive ceremony.  The captain and his men stood all ready, the captain watching the sun as it sunk on the horizon.  At the instant it disappeared he gave the word, and at one stride came the light.  I chanced at the moment to be standing between the lantern and the sea, and I was asked to move with an earnestness of entreaty in which the safety of a whole navy seemed to be involved.  The light may be seen forty-eight miles away.  It is fine to think of all the eyes within that extent of sea, invisible to us, caught almost simultaneously by this point of flame.

I did not stay at Nieuwediep but at The Helder.  Thirty years ago, however, one could have done nothing so inartistic, for then, according to M. Havard, the Hotel Ten Burg at Nieuwediep had for its landlord a poet, and for its head waiter a baritone, and to stay elsewhere would have been a crime.  Here is M. Havard’s description of these virtuosi:  “No one ever sees the landlord the first day he arrives at the hotel.  M.B.R. de Breuk is not accessible to ordinary mortals.  He lives up among the clouds, and when he condescends to come down to earth he shuts himself up in his own room, where he indulges in pleasant intercourse with the Muses.